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A Present Presence, Presencing, and the Place of “Anak” in the Collective Memory of the People of the Philippines in the Homeland and in the Diaspora

By

Dr. Aurelio Solver AgcaoiliUniversity of Hawai`i at Manoa

The paratextual in the book, Anak, is a mine of that which is semiologically fecund, the dark blue of the cover with the sepia of old pictures cut out to form the book’s main title. A newspaper cutout, with Dr. Jose Protacio Rizal in the center of the letter “A,” the first of the economized title, plays out the colors white and the blue of a blueprint, a color a journalist of old is familiar with. The outside back cover is a sea of blue, wavy and undulating, except for the now familiar icon of the Filipino Centennial Celebration Commission, the man with a hat. Released at the closing of the Centennial Celebration in Maui, this book, truly, is a long-lasting covenant of the Filipino Americans in Maui with the Filipino people in the Philippines and abroad.

When I received my copy, a gift—daton—from this newspaper’s publisher CJ Ancheta, I took the book from the student who came to deliver it, gently carried it on my desk, and looked at the packet, heavy and hard. I knew this was Anak; CJ Ancheta had called me days before to tell me that he was sending me a copy of the book the Maui Filipino Centennial Celebration Coordinating Council put together to give tribute to the Filipinos of Maui, the Filipinos of the “past, present, and future.”

I tempered the eagerness to open the packet and speak to the book—or permit the book to speak to me. I have seen many of the Centennial celebrations, with our Ilokano program giving its share when we held the first-ever Nakem Conference in November 2006. Last December, I took part in the last of the international conferences honoring the Filipino and narrating of his century of experience in the immigrant land. Likewise, I took part in the formal closing ceremonies, and there, I saw how all of these activities sanctifying the sacrifices of our people are plain and simple, labors of love. I knew that this book would be in the same mold: indeed, a labor of love by the people of Maui for the Filipino people as a whole. This thought awed me. It was the same thought that drove me to open the packet and explore the World opened up by the Word of the book—word becoming world, word opening up a clearing—a kaingin—especially for those who do not know Maui the way they know the back of their hands but share the same energy and fire of that abstract reality we call “Filipino experience” in the plantations.

I flipped through the first few pages and there, in the inside front cover running through the first page, are the happy faces of plantation workers vomited by a plantation house, the workers in their Sunday’s best, perhaps going to a church and pray for grace and blessing so that the next week would be one of endurance and patient understanding of the human condition. The student of symbols in me was working: I flipped through the last page and hit right through the inside back cover, and there, the symbols—the signs of signs—are coming full circle for there, on that one whole spread, in sepia tones, are the plantation workers in their ‘americana,’ that suit that is worn only by the rich and the powerful in the homeland. I see the context of the picture, perhaps a fiesta, perhaps a community celebration recalling the homeland and the people left behind, recalling the memory that needs to come alive, kicking, and always reminding to all the workers that the homeland awaits, that there is a prize for persevering despite the challenges, the blatant injustices, the harsh treatment of the lunas, the discrimination, the kind of a give-away of the burned and brown skin. The lacerated flesh, we call this, but worse is the lacerated mind, the lacerated thought, the lacerated memory: there is eternity in the times of sacrifice and suffering especially when grief comes to grief, and when the grieving takes on years and years of enduring as if there is no let-up.

As you flip through the pages, more sepia smiles greet you, the sorrows and sadnesses hidden somewhere in the stiff and starched collars of semi-formal wear. And then this hits you hard: the story of the plantation workers joining a union, getting awakened—nakamurmuray is the Ilokano term for this—to the solid and hard fact that they are indentured, uneducated, and non-English speaking workers from the islands occupied by the United States but they are, indubitably, also persons with rights, their rights as human as human can be. This politicization of the Ilokano worker’s mind, I should say, is the beginning of more awakenings: the first step has been made and there is no turning back. This is politics in one’s own hand, the power to govern resting on the people, the turay-linteg—power-law—coming from the people. It is the genesis of that people power that would turn the chips down in the more contemporary history of the Filipino people in the homeland. In a way, Albert Judd of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association succeeded in his “Filipino experiment” of recruiting Filipino workers to operate the sugarcane lands under harsh and oftentimes less than human conditions—but with the conscienticized workers, there was no turning back. The collective memory of struggle against all invaders was just there in the deepest recesses of the soul, the heart, the kararua, and the panunot. No, you cannot rob the Filipino workers of their Filipinoness and their humanity even if in the days of fear, the bosses partly succeeded. We call this basic decency. We call this self-respect, we call this honor—and honor they gave to themselves and to other people they worked with even as they struggled to fight for what is justly theirs: decent wages, decent living spaces, and decent treatment.

We keep flipping the pages and the texts speak to you in the sacred because sanctified silences of “Maui volunteers” in their group picture, most of whom, the caption says, are Filipino, the volunteers agreeing to fight for and in the name of the United States during the Second World War. The list goes on the succeeding pages, even as in the pages before, we get a glimpse of the Maui Filipinos who made a name for themselves because of their extraordinary abilities, with the retired judge Artemio Baxa, for instance, humble and unassuming, showing us the way to that greatness that does not invest upon that bastardly act of decapitating other people in order to rise. The medals and ribbons leap from the pages to remind us of the meaning of life, of mortality, and of ultimate sacrifice—the offering of one’s life in order to pursue peace not only for the place where you come from but also for other places where peace is a luxury, not a basic right. In the end, those who chose this land are given the option to make good with that choice, with that naturalization document that proclaims that the good Filipino “was entitled to be admitted to citizenship” and thus, “admitted as a citizen of the United States of America.”

We witness here, therefore, the dynamo—from contract worker to union member to doing good as a resident and then to citizenship. This is what the book is all about, its trajectory that of the celebratory spirit that makes the remembering soul catch fire, so that both in the remembrance and in the fire, more good things are dreamed of, more communal goals are pursued, and the sense of fairness and justice assured to everyone, citizen or non-citizen alike.

What informs the book Anak is the narrative thread we see all over the chapters, the voices of the story tellers and narrators coming all too clearly, the voices firm and solid, the voices coming off as incantations, as oraciones, as mantras, saying in the silences of the pages that we need to keep on with this duty to remember. I am reminded here of the intricate connection between story and history in the Ilokano mind. The book’s virtue is that it is both story and history: sarita and pakasaritaan. For a history has to be—ought to be and must be—a story first: the root word for pakasaritaan is sarita.

As we go through the list of extraordinary names with extraordinary deeds, we are awed, as if before us are a pantheon of those who have make it sure that no one among us will go to bed during the night with an empty stomach. They call this solidarity.

I call this panagkakadua: the kadkaddua oneing with the person, the kadkaddua buried back to the earth. Or the kadkaddua put in the earthen pot and then hung up in the topmost part of a tree to reach out to the skies.

Anak, thus, is a story of our people and its gift is that it will make us remember more and more. We call this, in sum, a present presence, and a presencing: in the here-and-now, in the present that is at the same time the future, in the past this both present and future.

The watching gets into you:the film is reminder of all that is in a teacher leaving for other places,the pretext the dreamthe context the futurethe subtext the pastthe paratext all that which will come to pass.

So with your film students,you sit down to count the credits unrollingand the poverty in a spectacle,mothers never knowing what nurturing isexcept to open their legs to the thieving semenof absent lovers hungry for more lustingbut never for the suave lovingof the soft moonlight for the barrio night.

There, the rain is a hard loverbrutal as brutal can be,the dust getting into the nostrils of murdered fathersand those who fight the darknessgetting into the lowly corners of thatched hutswhile those in fatigue and fanatic beliefin the democracy of all-time robbersin cities and conclaves of the electthe fated villages, for instance, no, not this last bastionof small-town misery and dreaming onthey complete the ceremony for the salvagingof a people's dream, them who seek the waysof old, the ways of rivers seeking the ways of rainwaterfrom uphill down the valleys and plainsand in the west of lives lost seals its perpetual fate with the seas.

You cry one more timein your corner of the room, darkened to filterall the scenes that remind you of homelandthat was never, never your homethe beating of its heart late for the ritual of remembranceand you think of the past tense of loving a heartland,the one place you have loved but never loved you back.

Will you be the teacher who came backfrom the Promised Land of some milk some honey and so much grieving,the last one poured oh so generously on your early morning green tea?

A MALE POETICS AND THE MALE GAZE : PRELIMINARY NOTES IN THE STUDYOF PHILIPPINE POPULAR CULTURE

Aurelio S. Agcaoili, Ph.D.

(Revised excerpt of an essay published in Salaysay: Researches on Language and Literature, 2000, pp. 176-185)

Refiguring the Context of Male Poetics

My purpose in this essay is to problematize what I call ‘male poetics’ in Philippine culture, particularly Philippine popular culture. It is at the same time an attempt to bring into a theoretical and engaged level of discourse what the ‘male experience’ is all about, an experience that is somehow named and not named, said and unsaid, sayable and unsayable, open and hidden, consistent and conflicted, even contradictory. Easily, you see a strategic trick here when you see a simple mind trying to complicate matters by raising new questions from old answers and pointing out new answers to old questions like the hermeneut of texts and counter-texts (Gadamer 1970). I hold on to the view that the question and answer divide is not a real divide but a dialectic: a question properly formulated always-already contains the germ of an answer and by implication, the answer already contains the question. This dialectic between the question and the answer is what will guide me in addressing the basic issues about male poetics as this kind of a poetics bears upon what I loosely taxonomize as my new question on the human condition, or if you wish, the male condition.

My way of looking at the male gaze looking at itself in relation to others and the world and relationships is, admittedly, and angled way of seeing: angled precisely because the perspective in which I try to see and understand the male experience is pre-shaped and preformed by a number of obvious factors. The voice you hear—that interpretive voice—is male and the assumption of that voice is that of the ‘male experience’ many women have refused or failed to understand because: (a) it is unhygienic to do so—it pollutes the agendum of the female/woman to get liberated from the bondage of patriarchy; (b) it is anti-women because women must finally declare their autonomy from men; and (c) it is anti-sisterhood because sisterhood, to be authentic and real, must adopt a tactic that excludes the male in the fight against oppression, inequity, inequality, tyranny of male power, dominance of male authority, and many other grand, big concepts of “middle class,” sometimes “burgis—bourgeois” feminism that hews closely on, predictably, citified, urbanized values and elite sensibilities and what have you. I tell my feminist friends: it is easy to cry foul about male hegemony and oppression perpetrated by agents of patriarchy. “But patriarchy itself is not preserve of the male,” I tell them. Patriarchy, among others, is an attitude, a gaze, a way of experiencing, seeing, looking, understanding. It is a disposition of the mind, the disposition essentially a product of many variables, including the involuntary, perhaps conditioned, admission by women, of its hegemonic power and tyrannical control.

Coming from this as my angled gaze, my prejudiced and biased way of looking at male poetics, I hope to show that to teach an artifact of a culture that is sensitive to the issues about men or about the ‘male experience’ is essentially to trod on not-so-hallowed ground in order to offer a different, perhaps, a uniquely different insight on what is to be a male human being. I must admit that all throughout my attempt at coming to terms with the poetic and the narrative as both a writer and a teacher, I have always been fascinated by “the male question.” Friedman (1963) has a term for the female—“the feminine mystique” which some would corrupt, in a tongue-in-cheek way, as “the feminine mistake.” Of course, you would not even dignify this by commenting on it but this counter-naming is a semiotics unto its own: there is control here, there is dominance, there is an attempt to nullify the female dream to once again make it possible for women’s selves to “dance with their selves.”

In their “Foreword” to Masculine/Feminine (1960) Roszak and Roszak wrote: “He is playing masculine. She is playing feminine. He is playing masculine because she is playing feminine” (vii). The notion of play metaphorizing the divide between the male and female was elaborated by them, thus: “He desires her for her femininity which is his femininity, but which he can never lay claim to. She admires him for his masculinity which is her masculinity, but which she can never lay claim to” (vii). The declaration of Friedman that “men are just desserts” (1983), that is “when a man is an enchantment to the already complete and satisfying life of a woman who makes choices and takes action”; (xii) establishes the need for a male poetics that is capable to address head on the poetics of the female, with both poetics eventually oneing, uniting, converging, fusing—their horizons wedded to each other—to form a new world, a new sensibility, a newly liberated human condition.

I am aware that this essay might be raising more questions than it can afford to answer. I would be consoled by the fact that I raised the questions well. One thing must not be forgotten, though by the cultural worker of and on the Philippines and its people, and by “cultural worker” I mean all those who work in the arena of cultivating consciousness: that there has been an “area of silence” in male studies and that this area of silence has contributed to an non-understanding –or non-communication, if you wish—between the sexes and among the genders.

The urbanized, middle class, sometimes bourgeois sensibility relative to gender and gender liberation has fought and has pushed for a certain variety of gayhood/gayness as legitimate gender or sexual identity and at some point, this sensibility has gained so much ground in the battle for equality. With Sapphic/lesbian writings successfully articulating counter-hegemonic cultural poetics/aesthetics side by side with voluminous gay writings by men, some of them not necessarily gay or not professedly gay, this counter-hegemonic cultural poetics has covered so much ground, so much terrain, and the victory for human liberation might soon be had.

But the big trouble really comes in when we factor in the political economy of human liberation. At what cost can we really be liberated? How are we to regard the prefiguring the sexes with biology determining what is to be written on the curriculum vitae? How are we to take the male gaze and the male experience and the male sensibility in the context of the (a) continuum of human sexuality and (b) rich varieties of masculinity or also called masculinities, that male condition revealing human realities and potentials, human actualities and possibilities? How are we to account the poetics of male suffering in Awiyao in Daguio’s “Wedding Dance” when Awiyao, amidst the frenzied beating of the gangsas, declared: “Lummay, it’s you I love, you know that. But what will the leaders say, what will my friends say?” How are we to account ‘male experience’ and male poetics in the film “Macho Dancer”?

So, how do we teach the male gaze, the male voice, the male experience? In short, what approach would make us productively teach a poetics about masculinity that is not necessarily patriarchal precisely because it is a poetics that questions the assumptions about male dominance and male power and male privilege? In effect, what strategies must we employ in the classroom to teach about concern for and sensitivity to the male condition?

The questions above assume an obvious fact: that male poetics belongs to the Naturwissenschaften or to the studies about the human and the humane and thus it is but proper that this poetics puts into play all issues, questions, and problematiques that are seen as contributory to making human liberation difficult. This means that male poetics is predictably a poetics of the human condition and must be so: a poetics that tries as much to understand the axiological premises of human action, particularly male human agency even as it condemns male privileges, masculine claims to superiority, male power and what have you.

Double Bind and the Fallacy of Male Power

The mass media—films, popular magazines, fan magazines, cinema posters, cinema billboards, and commercial advertisements, to name a few—are guilty of so many things relative to malehood and masculinity. The “bang-bang” ways of then actor Joseph Estrada, Fernando Poe Jr., Philip Salvador, Rudy Fernandez, Ramon Revilla Sr. and Jr., Lito and Jess Lapid did not bring about social justice but only graphic, at times vulgar, resolution to inequity and violence in a mass scale.

The pronouncements of these “bang-bang” heroes did not end up as verbum-caro-factum-est but disincarnation of what is real and true and meaningful precisely because they are born of the fantastic and the formulaic, with no density at all, no reflexivity, no critique of the democratized sadness of the sorrowing masses the heroes were to liberate from bondage.

Celluloid—cinematic/filmic—solutions, we call these heroes, the heroes only acting as heroes, their acting never for real. On the other side of the same illusory, at times sadomasochistic posturing of filmic saviors posing as modern-day redeemers of bruised, wounded male self and male ego is the pornographic representation of the male in his phallic splendor of disorder with the Bench models to boot, to account the masked joys and self-congratulations of the male, the genitals of what accounts for them celebrating everything but life.

We have the male Richard Gomez, a sports buff, pictured as an expectant father in that delivery room scene, with his Lucy Torres on the clinical table being wheeled to where else but the deodorized room where babies are predictably “thrown into” life, into the cosmos, into earth minus the dirt and misery and deprivation all others males in this country are subjected to. Think of the eight of every then Filipino males unable to set foot on the Lysol-ed enclaves of Gomez.

Think of the myth this mass media produced image of the male has reproduced and how this same image, precisely because it lacks sensitivity to the condition of the masses of the Filipino male, has generated more anguish than joy, more sorrow than laughter, more pointed references to deprivation than a promises for liberation.

The perennially clean, good-looking, strong, virile male getting all the adulation, envy, and attention sometimes results in deeper pain and injury because the majority of the males do not belong to the same class of those who can afford to leisurely row a boat (the deprived row their boats for a living and not for leisure), to bronze one’s skin in order to let the muscles ripple, to whiz a golf ball the way Tiger Woods does, to climb artificial walls and artificial mountains after ingesting capsules and capsules of that sex pill that makes one gallop like a horse.

“Buhay ang dugo—blood is raging and alive” claims the other ad on male multivitamins and we have a daily wage earner—a construction worker at that—hammering here and there and building houses for the rich and then in the evening, goes home to his children and wife as virile as ever, as sexy as ever, as manly as ever, as if human energy is bottled like a costly Gatorade and Powerade and Red Bull and then gulping them as if one’s life depended on them and presto, one regains one’s strength and vigor and youth and manhood.

This myth of youth negates the scars, the wounds, the trauma, and the haunting memory of manhood.

At best, the myth hawks a dream of youth never spent, of prosperity that has nothing to do with laboring under the sun and sweating for capitalists and businessmen who know nothing but profit and return on investment. We can go on and on and this fantastic notion of the male including his chivalry and greatness is at best a luxury of the moneyed, the well-off, the privileged—in short, those who have most of the options in life like Agustin in that melodrama, Rosalinda, that has substituted the Angelus and other religious rituals for many Filipino families. Even Fernando Jose’s view of his remarriage to Rosalinda speaks of a feudal society life Mexico, which is as well the Philippine case: “Akin ka na ngayon, Rosalinda—Rosalinda, you are mine.” These males of the feudal and capitalist mold are brawn and not much brains, all sexy but not much self-reflection and sensitivity and openness to life’s terrible truths, to its twists and turns, to its endless surprises.

The male produced by the capitalist is the male in Jomari Yllana baring his skin with his Bench brief; the male in the Seven-up opening himself to the seductive power of commerce and to the illusions of satiation from want commodified desire offers.

So from “bang-bang” to “capitalist” and “feudal” males, we are left with nothing eventually, unless, by our critical reflection as cultural workers and by our different angled looking and seeing as teachers of the poetic, we realize that only through our concerted effort may we raise the consciousness of our young so that they will once again value the person in every man the oppressive society has systematically buried into oblivion. From plastic loves to plastic selves and plastic definitions of male identity, we graduate into the real, we graduate into the raw elements of life, we see in context the episteme by which our understanding of the lived male experience can become more productive, more human, more liberative, more liberating.

The Social Construction of the Male in an Oppressive Society

A society founded on an unjust arrangements of its basic institutions will continue to produce males who go by the script of that society, the script at times, bordering on masquerade and inauthenticity because the script calls for roles that may not be real or may not have anything to do with the project to become “human all too human” (Nietzshe 1984). The pursuit for the human is a genuine pursuit and thus it frames agency and commitment and responsibility including our responsibility to human memorias. The poetic is grounded on the memorias, on our act to become a member again—to re-member, in fact, so that in this remembrance, a community is built up, a congregation pf those who believe in life gets to grow, evolve, mature. It is in the memorias that the retelling of our dreams and aspirations and desires takes its form, assumes a shape, and become a giver of meaning.

The problem, however, is the venue for retelling, the situs for the narrative to be told and retold. The evil society reproduces itself as it reproduces its own agents who will guarantee that its fabricated truths passed off as the truth remains and will be fabricated over and over again in the course of time. The big trouble, too, is the male is somehow involved in this and therefore he must be reminded of this commitment to the memorias, his responsibility to the realization of a human communion that is as sacramental as any fusion, any oneing, any bonding, any uniting. In this we target the evolving of a continuing construction of the new male, one who is in touch even with his fears and scars and sorrows, one who can afford to keep on renewing himself in order to free himself from a maleness that is twin to “roughness, impatience, insensitivity, and self-inflation” (Francisco 1997:xi)

I can really go on and on but all told, a male poetics must look at the male and maleness (masculinity, if you wish) as predication of a liberating concept about “manhood in the making” (Gilmore 1990) and about the rich varieties of “men’s lives” (Kimmel and Messner 1989). For surely, there is more to men than just the lazy episteme of stereotyping where men, like women, are placed in society’s boxes and squares and circles and triangles and their person and worth measured according to these apriorized parameters.

In fine, a male poetics is an attempt to understand what Rankin has sung out: “I’ve been alone all my life. Couldn’t give my heart to anyone. Hiding in myself was a man who needed to be held like anyone.”

(For Terry Tugade of TMI America/Global for reminding me what fatherhood in absentia should ever mean and for saying that the youngest daughter needs all the poems she will read to fill in blanks of the lives of a father gone on exile and a daughter going to win her awards)

You do not write to your last born no more, says the poet,he who lives in times and places beyondthe raging waters down here in my heart.The sorrows came in abundanceand the present past was a poem pluralized.

I tell him, our cellphones bridging us: "There is no country for exiles."

It is my singular sentence its predicate he knows,but I tell him nonetheless, and no country ever comes to own us poets of loves for a homeland denying us.

I tell him too:I write poems for the dear daughtereach day, the lines fierce and faithfulof what longing is for a stanzawith no reason and rhyme:

it is the same poem multiplyinglike the August mushroomsin the eastern hills after the heavy rainswhen the ricefields in the west are heavywith grains and grace.

And each day of absence I dream of feasts multiplyinga hundredfold after the harvest seasonof sun and songs

the songs their lines I carry in my soullike distant relatives on pilgrimage to a shrinefor the common ancestors, like the family homewith the pain of growing shared,the memory etched in a bright stonewe keep for its magic.

The songs we sing come to hear the chanting of beautiful dreams pursuedby a father and a daughterwho know what dreams are made of:years of longing limningand in these times the dancersare singers as well dancing on the edgesof remembrance and regretrenewal and remorsefor leaving and not coming home too soon.

You do not write to your last bornno more, you say, and I write your wordsaccusing and telling me soto make a poem of my absent grief.

I am most happy painting canvassesof not being there each day: the ribbons, hers, she counts in early eveningsshe talks to her pupils, the dollsI send from faraway placesI am preparing for her to come to live,hoping she will stay to writeof the distances we knew were always there.

There is the right time for all these, this writing and this defense:the lines of poems must be keptin the vault of our private selves,the sense of our words revealing only so muchhiding more in the lie of our wordsfor small truths to come unravelled.

1.It is what you go back to, these notes you wrote by stealing time in airports, notes on edgesof memory, seamless when it comesseamless when it doesn't.

In waiting lounges before and afterreaching your destination country,forgetting is a virtue over here even as you while away the hoursby killing time mercillesly, killing time to kill all that is in thereto remember the streets of your cityas you wait for your airborn flight to many placesnot yet your home, fleeing as iffleeing is all that matters.

You transit in thesetransitory times, territories too time guarding youas you move from gates to gatesyour luggage carrying all about youyour heart your soul your sorrowbecause nothing can ever be left to chanceor to small tales going somewhereto layover in dark roomsdark alleys and all things dark when you brood over loose leavesof organizers that kept the feelingswhen solitude is in its less holiest.

2.This is how you do it:write and keep the writing to hidewhat needs no saying because sacredunsayable unsaid.

As if words are what life is:words that define what missing your city is, in full sense,with no ruses and lies and maskslike missing daughters and wife and songoing after years gone the years between you and themlike warm nights so far away from misty morningswhen the aroma of coffeeis the same barako you knowfrom the hills in Benguetor the Arabica boughtground and bought in hasteat the Robinson'swith your few dollars disappearing fastand furious as if in their mad rushto emptying your soulwhen poverty was all you wantedin the life you walledyour walled life for yearsuntil you realized you werea poet of pain, somehow.

3.The poet could have told you againabout the sadnesses you keep in versesbut you take all, take it all inkeep them all as if the landscapeis just there, before you, its forma scream primal and the pathosin it are the same vagaries calling it quits.

Rhythm is all that mattersin this business of relivingthe lost music of our years.

Mondays see me going into the young night in this valleyof rainbows roses remembrancesto rendezvuous with fiery fingersflirting with sounds of the djembe.

First, I did not know how musiccomes out of skin and the memoryof a dead calf.

And the wood,its grain the color of this year, red, and then mellowing to yellowlike my country's revolutiontwenty years ago. We killed the man,and the nation's war drums went on berserk with angerrevolution strugglewhich is what I do nowmy mind going berserk as wellwith the rhythms cavorting with angelsand gods

and I let my fingers dancedance dance and swirl with the staccatoof my soul getting a lift a high a tripaway from the humdrum of the everydayand I let the music of my skin my face my hairget into my lipsand the enduring endless drumming beginsbegins begins begins and the dancing fingersdo not know the meaning of end.

Each Monday I told myself:I will go through the same ritual with Reggae,me and five others looking for the spiritof our tired bodies looking for some restin the frenzy of beatsthe takataktak-takataktakour language the only language that frees.